A Falsy Life
By Jonathan Lam on 01/23/16
Tagged: the-homework-life the-homework-life-thought
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The life I live is not so much an honest one. I live in a world of unnatural comfort and artificial hardships. We choose what to make difficult in our lives, and we choose what we would like to make easier. The same goes for many of the lives around us in this affluent county I live in.
As humans and inventors, we like to make life easier. We build shelters and clothing, the homes and clothes that keep us warm and comfortable on cold winter days as this. We create easy sources of food and energy, so that we can function better. And there. We have our basic necessities covered, and the human race is fit to advance to an extended life of synthetic comfort.
But then what? With higher education, with the ability to learn from ourselves with our over-sized grey matter, we looked deeper into more solutions. How can we make our human experienced so advanced? How can we solve all the problems that exist in our world? We searched for conveniences to boost our productivity, and therefore our knowledge grew in an exponential function. Life started slow in the ancient times, thousands of years ago. People discovered the wheel and other simple machines, and it sped up a little. As science grew with great philosophers (and sometimes fell back a little, such as Aristotle's view on the atomic theory), we began to learn and grow. Even though we made mistakes, we came back with our collective knowledge. As Ray Bradbury put it in Fahrenheit 451 (emphasis mine):
There was a silly damn bird called a phoenix back before Christ, every few hundred years he built a pyre and burnt himself up. He must have been the first cousin to Man. But every time he burnt himself up he sprang out of the ashes, he got himself born all over again. And it looks like we're doing the same thing, over and over, but we're got on damn thing the phoenix never had. We know the damn silly thing we just did. We know all the damn silly things we've done for a thousand years and as long as we know that and always have it around where we can see it, someday we'll stop making the goddamn funeral pyres and jumping in the middle of them. We pick up a few more people that remember every generation.
We've built and destroyed civilizations. We've made huge mistakes and fixed them. However, we never lost our edge on technology. On innovation. We've kept on expanding, on improving. The Industrial Revolution came and sped this up tenfold. And with the enormous growth of the Internet, the speed of our global growth has taken another giant leap. (I've also made a small website, A Tech Life, as a presentation last year to demonstrate this: to show the importance of the Internet and modern technology in general.) We've taken the early steps and we've learned from our mistakes.
But now, the overuse of modern technology is becoming increasingly prevalent. In A Tech Life my thesis was that the technology of today is becoming a dependency of life; it is a major aspect of the Lexus that we strive for in globalization and development: we want to become more and more complex and advanced. The benefits are obvious: we live an easier life with modern, everday devices. But the negative implications of this kind of a situation are not as noticable.
Bradbury addressed this idea in Fahrenheit 451, a story placed many years in the future, a world destroyed and deadened by ourselves. Sure, all the cars travel at a hundred miles per hour and the billboards are two-hundred feet long in order to compensate. But in a world in which books are burned to keep everyone happy, when taking walks or talking to people are discouraged as non-social activities, when laughing or familial relationships are suppressed, it's easy to see from an outside perspective what went wrong. Ultimately, the main character recognizes the difference between his pseudo-happiness and true contentedness. He realizes that he can't answer the question, "Are you happy?" This allows him to recognize the faults of man and understand the analogy of pheonix to man.
No, I'm not implying that our species will ever turn to that. Actually the opposite— there exist so many Orwellian novels that warn us of a time like that. However, we already are touching the edge of unhappiness. It's evident through the high rates of horrifying homicide or devastating divorce that happen in our society today. And to think we're advancing when we can't even preserve two basic cornerstones of human existence: our humanity and the importance of marriage.
In English class, we read a article about technology, "How not to be alone" (it's an intriguing article; I'd recommend you read it), that addresses the debate head-on.
We often use technology to save time, but increasingly, it either takes the saved time with it, or it makes the saved time less present, intimate and rich. I worry that the closer the world gets to our fingertips, the further it gets from our hearts.
Again, this reiterates what Bradbury said, but it is so true. He also mentions in the article how the forms of technology we used to communicate are "diminished" substitutes to natural, interpersonal speech; and, as we become more and more dependent on it, we, too, become "diminished substitutes."
But as this is becoming more evident in our world, why bring it up? Well, this has much to do with my life right now. I'm typing on an good-quality (albeit old) Acer laptop in a warm and very adequate home, when it's snowing outside (quite heavily, too), not having to worry about my safety or overall survival (I mean that I don't count on dying anytime soon, but it is possible, especially considering cross-country running practices.). I am warm, I have time to think and write freely (although I should be doing homework), and I have time to do homework without having to worry about work or money. Yes, I'm thankful for this, and I am thankful for the technology that allows us to do it. This is the kind of lifestyle that many of my friends and their families enjoy as well.
That's only the positive side of our life, however. This extra time allowed for by our over-advancedness also gives us the free time to wander off. I check Facebook too often and am too concerned about getting "good" grades rather than my overall well-being (even though I know both are very important to a bright future). Others play video games and slack off from school to meet with friends and have a social life (and, if that was the full and correct meaning of "life," I truly need one). Only the truly motivated have the ability to push ahead.
However, what I find peculiar about this life we live are the adversities we create for ourselves. We make our lives difficult; if we could do what we want and slack off, then there would exist no school, and no TheHomeworkLife. I would not write articles for the sake of writing, just to try and improve myself. Heck, I would just go out and play in the beautiful snow we're having right now! But us humans have some common sense. We understand the importance of education, both academically and educationally. We understand the importance of physical wellness. We understand the importance of having a positive overall state-of-being. And for this reason, I am forced to play piano, learn Chinese, and go to school; willingly, however, I play trumpet, strive for higher-learning (and top grades), bowl, run (cross-country), code, and, write on my own.
It may seem that much of this is for "fun," and it is in part; however, I ascribe it mainly to our innate sense of innovation, our wonderful sense of improvement and advancement. We strive for perfection and greatness, and this innovative personality that resides in all of us makes it happen. The free time we have and the hardships we make are both due to modern technology; and, in turn, they are what makes us great, and allow for future innovation, thus continuing the virtous cycle of mankind. Therefore, our life is not a false life, but a falsy (a programming term used to denote something that is not exactly false, but something similar that evaluates to false, such as an empty string "", null, or 0); it is not a fake life, but a sort of a protected pseudo-reality that we created to build off of. And it's truly amazing how we continue to build onto this megastructure of collective knowledge that defines what makes us human.